As part of our goal of fostering discusssion among mHealth researchers, the mHealthHUB and MD2K have created a page for those interested in discussing or asking questions about MD2K software and also mHealth topics in general. Discuss@MD2K presently has categories for questions relating to the MD2K software (mCerebrum, Cerebral Cortex). The site allows users to sign in using their Facebook, Google or Github logins.

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To that end, we want to hear from you! Please let us know about upcoming events, research of interest to the mHealth community, job opportunities, or any other mHealth news.

We are especially interested in hearing from mHealth students and professionals interested in contributing content to mHealthHUB.

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The National Institutes of Health today announced $55 million in awards in fiscal year 2016 to build the foundational partnerships and infrastructure needed to launch the Cohort Program of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). The PMI Cohort Program is a landmark longitudinal research effort that aims to engage 1 million or more U.S. participants to improve our ability to prevent and treat disease based on individual differences in lifestyle, environment and genetics.

The awards will support a Data and Research Support Center, Participant Technologies Center and a network of Healthcare Provider Organizations (HPO). An award to Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, to build the biobank, another essential component, was announced earlier this year. All awards are for five years, pending progress reviews and availability of funds. With these awards, NIH is on course to begin initial enrollment into the PMI Cohort Program in 2016, with the aim of meeting its enrollment goal by 2020.

A recording of Dr. Ida Sim's Grand Rounds presentation at the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory is now available.

Dr. Sim is a Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of Biomedical Informatics at the UCSF Clinical Translational Science Institute. She is also co-founder of Open mHealth and an investigator for the NIH-funded Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K), where she heads the center's Consortium Core.

The adoption of mobile health technology has the potential to provide great benefits in terms of improved quality of healthcare, but is not without significant privacy and security challenges, according to a paper by four thought leaders in the field.

“Privacy and Security in Mobile Health: A Research Agenda,” featured in the June edition of Computer magazine, published by the IEEE Computer Society, examines the privacy and security challenges inherent in mobile health (mHealth) technology.

The paper was co-authored by David Kotz of Dartmouth College, Carl A. Gunter of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Santosh Kumar of the University of Memphis and Jonathan P. Weiner of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine. The IEEE Computer Society, with more than 60,000 members, is the world's leading membership organization dedicated to computer science and technology.

One of the goals of mobile health, or mHealth, is to translate data from wearable sensors into useful information that can help people monitor and improve their health. One of the ways to do that is by providing a just-in-time intervention, such as a text message or prompt, that is issued based on sensor data collected in real time.

A major research challenge is determining when to intervene. Delivered too often or at the wrong times, an intervention might become ineffective or even counterproductive.

The Mobilize Center at Stanford University sponsored mHealth Connect, a day-long workshop aimed at improving the use of physical activity wearables and apps for clinical purposes.

The workshop brought together device and app developers with a diverse group of clinicians and researchers in order to foster cross-understanding, seed collaborations, and identify key barriers and next steps to advance this field. Sessions were held in March and streamed online. Videos of the sessions have now been posted on the Mobilize Center's YouTube channel and are linked below:

MD2K researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have had research papers accepted at two prestigious conferences. Dr. Tyson Condie and Matteo Interlandi, a postdoctoral scholar, were co-authors on both papers.

The research detailed in each of the papers focused on developing processes that help improve large-scale, or Big Data analytics using the Apache Spark cloud computing platform.

Papers are being sought for the mini-track “Social Media and Healthcare Technology” at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), to be held January 4-7, 2017 at Hilton Waikoloa Village.

HICSS, which is associated with IEEE, is an international conference (50% of attendees are from outside the US) representing a broad array of systems sciences.

A two-day meeting will focus on how big data can be used to help children during their first 1,000 days, which are an important developmental period in infants and children.

The Precision Public Health Summit: The First 1,000 Days, is being hosted June 6 and 7 by the University of California, San Francisco, and is jointly sponsored by the White House and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The National Institutes of Health has announced three Requests for Applications (RFA) for training in biomedical big data science.

According to an announcement, each of the opportunities has a goal of training more researchers who will use new Big Data technologies, methods and tools. Training is expected across three major scientific areas: computer science or informatics, statistics and mathematics, and biomedical science.

BD2K is a trans-NIH initiative that aims to support advances in data science, other quantitative sciences, policy, and training that are needed for the effective use of big data in biomedical research.

Wireless Health 2016 has extended the deadline for submission of papers until 12:00 a.m.m PDT on May 30.

Wireless Health 2016 invites cutting edge wireless, connected and mobile health research from engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, data analytics, biomedical and health disciplines. The unique mission of the Wireless Health conference, hosted again this year at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is to develop an international community to accelerate the development and adoption of new wireless, mobile and connected technologies designed to improve the quality and accessibility of health care interventions and promote public health.

Data analytics, precision medicine and the role they will play in healthcare in the future were the topics at an event hosted by Bloomberg Government and SAP Public Services on April 26.

The event, held in Washington, D.C., featured leaders from the private and public sectors, to discuss genomics, bioinformatics data, synchronization of electronic health records and patients' privacy protection.

A study by a team of Army researchers found that the success of mHealth devices is dependent on the level of patient engagement. The study examined the effectiveness of an mHealth communications app called mCare. mCare is used to facilitate conversations between renabililtating soldiers and their care teams.

Overall, the researchers found the mHealth tools helped to improve patient well-being but that the success of the app varied according to patient background and level of engagement.

Applications are being sought for the first annual Health Data Exploration Project Summer Institutes scheduled for July 10-16 in San Diego, California.

The HDE Summer Institute is an intensive, 1-week training institute on personal health data research methods for doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars. Approximately 30 participants will be chosen by competitive application from a variety of relevant disciplines including public health, medicine, informatics, human-computer interaction, computer science, data science, and design. The application deadline is April 18.

The National Institutes of Health has selected Eric Dishman to head the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program. The PMI Cohort Program seeks to extend precision medicine to all diseases by building a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants. The cohort is a key element of President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative, announced in January 2015.

PMI takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle when designing treatment for disease. By taking into account the biological, environmental and behavioral influences on on diseases, researchers hope to enable a new era of medicine in which researchers, providers and patients work together to develop individualized treatment plans.

The Mood Challenge, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is asking researchers, technologists and data scientists to submit proposals for ResearchKit Astudies to examine mood and its relationship to daily life, health and well-being.

Interested researchers can register for an April 19 informational webinar. Proposals are due May 22, and semifinalists will be announced in July. Finalists will be announced in October and the winner announced in May 2017.

The World Health Organization's mHealth Technical Evidence Review Group has developed a mHealth Evidence and Reporting Assessment (mERA) checklist.

According to a paper in The BMJ, "The mHealth Evidence and Reporting (mERA) checklist was developed as a checklist of items which could be applied by authors developing manuscripts that aim to report on the effectiveness of mHealth interventions and by peer reviewers and journal editors reviewing such evidence."

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has created an online tool that will help developers of health-related mobile apps to understand what federal laws and rules may apply to their apps.

“Mobile app developers need clear information about the laws that apply to their health-related products,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release. “By working with our partner agencies, we’re helping these businesses build apps that comply with the law and provide more protection for consumers.”

mHealthHUB is a service of the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K). MD2K , headquartered at the University of Memphis, is supported by the National Institutes of Health Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative Grant #1U54EB020404